Like Chekhov, Smith shows his heroine, who believes that “music could make a difference in the temper of the world,”...
Gravely charming stand-alone from the chronicler of Mma Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie (The Lost Art of Gratitude, 2009, etc.) sees an aggressively ordinary English widow through the dark days of World War II.
Despite being warned by her tutor that too many women leave Cambridge with a husband instead of a career, that’s exactly what Lavender Ferguson does. Even worse, the man who presses her to marry him, wine-merchant scion Richard Stone, soon presses on to greener pastures—i.e., France with another woman. Deeply sad but matter-of-fact about her failed marriage, La retreats to Sussex, where she is financially secure but very much at loose ends. After war is declared, she casts about for some way to help the war effort in this isolated rural area where she’s never made the friends she rather naively expected. At length she volunteers to help arthritic chicken farmer Henry Madder feed the troops and the nation. While she’s working as a freelance Land Girl, a conversation with Squadron-Leader and amateur trumpeter Tim Honey prompts La to take the lead in forming an amateur orchestra that can keep up the locals’ spirits and perhaps even show Hitler a thing or two. Her plans put her into close contact with wounded Polish airman Feliks Dabrowski, a flutist who lacks both an eye and an instrument. La falls in love with Feliks. A thief relieves Henry of £800. Suspicion is confined to an uncomfortably small circle. As in Chekhov, such incidents constantly portend decisive developments that somehow never come to pass.
Like Chekhov, Smith shows his heroine, who believes that “music could make a difference in the temper of the world,” triumphing over the details of everyday life by immersing herself in them so completely that she achieves an apotheosis in the reflection, “I have been a handmaiden.”Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37838-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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